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The Rhythm of Thought in Gramsci

Giuseppe Cospito, University of Pavia. Translated by Arianna Ponzini

Many scholars have recently shown great interest in a diachronic re-examination of Antonio Gramsci’s main theoretical-political categories in the Prison Notebooks. This method would uncover the origins and development of Gramsci’s concepts using the same method that Gramsci himself believed would allow us to grasp ‘the rhythm of thought’ in Marx. The present work embraces this perspective and puts it to work in two ways. Its first part analyzes the relation between structure and superstructure and the concepts of hegemony and the regulated society. Its second part extends the diachronic analysis to the conceptual pairings which represent alternatives to structure-superstructure, encompassing questions of political and cultural organisation as well as the relation between Gramsci and the major proponents of historical materialism (Marx, Engels, Lenin).

Biographical note

Giuseppe Cospito, Ph.D. (1999), University of Turin, is Assistant Professor of History of Philosophy at the University of Pavia. He has published monographs and a number of articles on Niccolò Machiavelli, Giambattista Vico, Carlo Cattaneo and Antonio Gramsci.

Readership

All those interested in a more detailed analysis of Gramsci’s thinking in light of Italian philological tradition, in particular university libraries and institutions, academics, PhD students and university graduates.

2. Hegemony
2.1. Introduction
2.2. ‘Posing the issue’
2.3. Hegemony and civil society
2.4. Hegemony and the intellectuals
2.5. Hegemony and the party
2.6. The sources of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony
2.7. A (re)definition of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony

6. Gramsci and the Marxist Tradition
6.1. ‘Marx, the author of concrete political and historical works’: Caesarism and Bonapartism
6.2. Engels and the Marxist vulgate
6.3. Conclusion: Gramsci, from Lenin to Marx

Bibliography
Index

Historical Materialism is a Marxist journal, appearing 4 times a year, based in London. Founded in 1997 it asserts that, not withstanding the variety of its practical and theoretical articulations, Marxism constitutes the most fertile conceptual framework for analysing social phenomena, with an eye to their overhaul. In our selection of material we do not favour any one tendency, tradition or variant. Marx demanded the 'Merciless criticism of everything that exists': for us that includes Marxism itself.